cubeta

The Spanish word cubeta has meanings that include ‘bucket, cask’ and ‘tray,’ particularly the kind of ‘ice tray’ found in the freezer compartment of a refrigerator and the kinds of trays used to hold chemicals. Cubeta is a diminutive of the cuba ‘tub, barrel, vat’ that had changed little from the Latin cūpa that likewise meant ‘tub, cask.’ Whether cūpa generated the Late Latin cuppa that Spanish has turned into copa and English into cup is possible but not universally accepted. What isn’t in doubt is that Spanish cubeta has as its cognate the French cuvette that English borrowed in the sense of ‘a tube or vessel used in laboratory experiments.’ Another diminutive tracing back to Latin cūpa is the dome-shaped cúpula/cupola that sits atop some buildings.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Careening from carena to keel

When posting about an American snout butterfly recently, I gave its scientific name: Libythaena carinenta. Later I wondered whether that species name might have been based on Latin carīna, meaning ‘keel.’ I still don’t know the answer, but I separately assumed Spanish would have inherited the Latin noun, and in fact it did, in the slightly different form carena. However, Spanish carena doesn’t mean ‘the keel itself of a ship’ but rather, in a definition from the DRAE, ‘parte sumergida del casco de un buque,’ the submerged part of a ship’s hull.’ It can also mean ‘the repair of a ship’s hull to make it watertight.’

That Spanish carena looks a lot like English careen is not just a coincidence. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the English word comes from the French phrase (en) carène ‘(on) the keel,’ whose main word came from carene, which Old French had borrowed from Old Italian carena, from the original Latin carīna. Careen originated as a nautical term with the sense ‘to incline to one side, or lie over, as a ship when sailing on a wind.’ Another nautical sense is ‘to cause (a vessel) to lean over so that she floats on one side, leaving the other side out of water and accessible for repairs below the water line.’ From the first nautical meaning came the regular English senses ‘to lurch or sway violently from side to side’ and ‘to move swiftly in a controlled or an uncontrolled way.’

If Spanish carena doesn’t mean ‘keel’ per se, how does Spanish say that? The word happens to be quilla, which might make you think Spanish had borrowed the term from English. Actually Spanish took it from French quille. It turns out that both the English and French versions trace back to the Old Norse word for ‘keel,’ kjölr. Those Vikings careened from place to place, no question about it.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

atelier

English and Spanish have both found a home for the French word atelier, which means ‘an artist’s or craftsman’s studio,’ but Spanish outdid English by also creating from atelier the doublet taller, whose meanings have expanded to include ‘workshop, garage, repair shop’ and even ‘seminar.’

So where did French atelier come from? The Old French form had been astelier, and the meaning back then was ‘a carpenter’s shop.’ A carpenter works in wood, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that astelier had been formed from the Old French astele that meant ‘splinter’: a carpenter was ‘a splinterer.’ At this point, we recognize Old French astele as the cognate of the synonymous Spanish astilla. The Old Spanish form had been astiella, which developed from Late Latin astella, a reworking of the Latin astula that also meant ‘a splinter.’

But wait: Spanish has not only the doublets atelier and taller, but also from Old French astelier the triplet astillero, which is ‘a shipyard.’ Until the mid-1800s, of course, all ships were made of wood, and shipbuilders were carpenters.

Corresponding to the Spanish proverb “Tal palo, tal astilla,” which conveys the idea that a splinter is like the wood it came from, English speaks of “a chip off the old block,” with the block standing in for a father and the chip being his son.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

ardido

Spanish has two words ardido. One is the past participle of arder ‘to burn.’ English speakers recognize it in the adjective ardent, which has a figurative sense. A similar metaphor has led Spanish ardido to be used in some countries to mean ‘burning with anger,’ in other words ‘angry, enraged.’ The present participle ardiente that corresponds to English ardent also appears in a figurative sense in aguardiente, literally ‘burning water,’ but actually ‘brandy.’ Compare the firewater that arose in the vocabulary of the Algonquian Indians once they were exposed to Europeans’ alcoholic beverages.

The other Spanish ardido means ‘brave, bold, daring,’ and not because the person being described that way has drunk too much firewater. No, this ardido came into Spanish from a word in a Germanic language related to native English hard. The ‘bold’ sense is clearer in English hardy. Perhaps surprisingly, given how similar-looking hard and hardy are, the latter is not native English but was borrowed from Old French, which had taken the word from a Germanic source. Closely related to this Spanish ardido is the noun ardid, which originally meant ‘a risky venture’ but now has the sense of ‘a ruse, a trick.’

Going back to the ‘burning’ ardido, we note that Spanish arder ‘to burn’ developed from the synonymous Latin ārdēre. The root of the past participle ārsus led to the Late Latin noun ārsiōn-, which via Anglo-Norman has become English arson. If there ever was a cognate of that in Spanish, it has apparently long since burned out.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

flébil

Spanish flébil is a literary word that means the same as its Latin source flēbilis ‘lamentable, deplorable, mournful,’ which had come from the verb flēre ‘to weep.’ If no English relative comes to mind, it’s in part because the first l dropped out of flēbilis as the adjective evolved into the Old French feble that passed into English and has taken on the modern form feeble. Note that the shift in meaning is another reason English-speaking students of Latin wouldn’t make a connection to an English descendant of flēbilis. Once we accept feeble, we can pretty easily see that it has a doublet, foible. That’s the form that made it into early modern French but is now obsolete in that language. What had started out as an adjective came to be used as a noun to designate ‘the weaker part of a sword blade.’ Semantic expansion led to the modern sense ‘a minor weakness or peculiarity in someone’s character or behavior.’ Webster’s 1828 Dictionary gave this definition: “A particular moral weakness; a failing. When we speak of a man’s foible in the singular, which is also called his weak side, we refer to a predominant failing. We use also the plural, foibles, to denote moral failings or defects. It is wise in every man to know his own foibles.”

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

allow

The English verb allow is unusual in that it comes from the merging of two verbs in Old French, neither of which meant ‘allow.’ One source was Old French alouer, which developed from Latin allaudāre, a compound of the laudāre that meant ‘to praise’ and that English has borrowed as laud. Latin laudāre evolved naturally in Spanish to loar.

The other contributor to Old French alouer was the Medieval Latin verb allocāre, which meant ‘to assign,’ and which English has acquired as allocate. The Latin verb was based on the noun locus ‘place,’ which served as the root for Spanish lugar.

Putting those two tracks together: somehow the notions of assigning and praising led in the Middle Ages to the sense of permitting that English allow took on and has retained.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Today is Easter

Today is Easter. Foreign students of English may wonder, as native speakers rarely seem to, whether there’s a connection between Easter and east. There is. Modern English east is descended from the identically spelled Old English east. (The word had two syllables, e-ast. The vowels were pronounced as in Spanish, and the first vowel was long, meaning that it was held for a longer time than the second vowel.) Old English east developed from the Indo-European root *aus- ‘to shine,’ so that in etymological terms east is the direction from which the sun shines forth at dawn.

English Easter [Sun]day traces back to Old English Easterdæg. The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica explained the first part of that compound (which was pronounced E-ast-er or E-ast-re, with the first vowel long): “The name Easter (Ger. Ostern), like the names of the days of the week, is a survival from the old Teutonic [i.e. Germanic] mythology. According to Bede (De Temp. Rat. c. xv.) it is derived from Eostre, or Ostdra, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, to whom the month answering to our April, and called Eostur-monath, was dedicated. This month, Bede says, was the same as the mensis paschalis, ‘when the old festival was observed with the gladness of a new solemnity.'” We can add that Anglo-Saxon Easter (or Eastre or Eostre or Ostdra) probably arose as a goddess of the dawn that brightens the eastern [from Old English easterne] horizon at the beginning of each day; and that the spring, of which Easter was a goddess, is the season in which the amount of sunshine gradually increases. Spring is metaphorically the dawning of the new year.

English east and the synonymous Spanish este are clearly related, but only scholars are likely to know that Spanish took este (originally leste, with the definite article attached, as still in Portuguese) from French est, and that French est had come from Middle English est. It’s curious that the word started out as east in Old English, became est in Middle English, and is now back to east (though with a different pronunciation). It’s also curious that both French and Spanish should have borrowed the word, directly or indirectly, from English.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

trabeate

Someone who encounters the unfamiliar English adjective trabeate (or trabeated) and looks it up at vocabulary.com finds as a first definition ‘not arcuate.’ Hmm. Fortunately the dictionary goes on to explain its explanation: ‘having straight horizontal beams or lintels (rather than arches).’ With that clarification, we recognize the arc in arcuate, but what about the trab in trabeate? That turns out to come from the Latin noun trabs, with genitive trabis, meaning ‘beam, timber.’ Latin trabs gave rise to Old French trave, which English has adopted as an architectural term meaning ‘crossbeam’ or ‘a portion of a construction made with crossbeams.’ Another architectural term is architrave (Spanish arquitrabe), which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as ‘the lowermost part of an entablature in classical architecture, resting directly on top of the columns. Also called epistyle.’

People in Roman times used beams not only as supports but also as obstacles, for example to secure the doors of buildings. Latin trabs evolved to Spanish traba, which has lost the literal and constructive senses and retained the ones pertaining to blocking and constraining. A traba is an ‘obstacle, hindrance, hobble.’ Trabas are ‘shackles.’ The derived verb trabar has meanings that include ‘to hinder, obstruct, bar, fasten, hobble, tie, hold shut,’ and even ‘wedge open.’ More constructively, a trabazón is an ‘assembly, link, joining, connection’; with regard to physical substances it means ‘consistency, coherence.’

If we go back well beyond Latin trabs, we find that the underlying Indo-European root is *treb-, which meant ‘dwelling.’ From that root came native English thorp, which designates ‘a small village.’ Though the word is archaic in its own right, it persists as the final element in many English place names. From thorp‘s Afrikaans cognate South African English has acquired the synonymous dorp. We also recognize the German cognate in place names like Düsseldorf.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

rival

The word rival, spelled the same in Spanish and English but of course pronounced differently, has an etymology that few people would guess. It comes from the Latin adjective rīvālis, which referred to two people who use the same rīvus, i.e. the same stream. Just goes to show that today’s fights over water rights are nothing new. And just because Latin rīvus meant ‘stream,’ we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that English river comes from the same source. It doesn’t, and therefore neither does the Spanish cognate ribera. It’s just a coincidence that Latin rīpa, ultimately the source of river and ribera, happened to mean ‘river bank.’ From Latin rīpa came the adjective rīpārius ‘having to do with a river bank,’ whose feminine form *rīpāria began to function as a noun in Vulgar Latin. Spanish ribera preserves the original sense of the river bank. In French rivière and English river, however, semantic drift has carried the meaning out into the water.

Coming back to the Latin rīvus that meant ‘stream,’ we’ll note that the derived verb derivar/derive has the literal sense ‘to flow from.’ The underlying Indo-European root *rei-, which meant ‘to flow’ and ‘to run,’ is the source of native English run.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Not all that glitters is gold

In a recent comment on my other blog, Jim at How I See It asked about “the relationship of the words oro, ore, oriole, orange, aura, and the gold symbol Au.” Etymologically, it makes sense to take the last first, because chemistry uses the symbol Au as an abbreviation of the Latin noun for ‘gold,’ aurum; that’s the predecessor of Spanish oro, the first word in the list. Oriole is also related. English acquired it from Old French, where it developed from Latin aureolus, a diminutive of aureus, the adjective corresponding to aurum; that makes an oriole ‘a golden [bird].’ Latin aureus is the obvious source of Spanish áureo. It’s the less obvious source of öre, a Swedish unit of currency that’s 1/100 of a krona.

The fact that oriole sounds a lot like Oreo, the familiar cookie, made me wonder if there’s a connection. An article at thoughtco.com has this to say:

So where did the name “Oreo” come from? The people at Nabisco aren’t quite sure. Some believe that the cookie’s name was taken from the French word for gold, “or” (the main color on early Oreo packages).

Others claim the name stemmed from the shape of a hill-shaped test version; thus naming the cookie in Greek for mountain, “oreo.”

Still others believe the name is a combination of taking the “re” from “cream” and placing it between the two “o”s in “chocolate” – making “o-re-o.”

And still, others believe that the cookie was named Oreo because it was short and easy to pronounce.

Or, says snarky me, maybe it’s called Oreo because the name comes from explanation 1 or 2 or 3 or 4.

Of the remaining three words in the original query, none are related to each other or to gold. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, ore developed from a cross between “Old English ōra and Old English ār, brass, copper, bronze.” English orange and the Spanish cognate naranja are ultimately of Dravidian origin; you can read the word’s interesting history here. As for aura, it goes back to Greek aurā, which meant ‘breath.’ That’s still a primary sense in Spanish. From it came the extended meaning ‘slight breeze,’ which is a poetic sense in Spanish and used to be a meaning of the word in English as well.

In closing, let me point out the wording of this post’s title, which is logically correct. The commonly heard “all that glitters isn’t gold” logically means that every glittering thing isn’t gold, which is obviously not true. My version bears the indisputable aura of reason.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman